City urges UCSF to open campus at Mission Bay

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, September 24, 1996

1996-09-24 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Mayor Brown wants the long-awaited and soon-to-be-unveiled plan for Mission Bay to include a new campus for the University of California at San Francisco.

"We know that UCSF has narrowed to looking at two or three sites for a new campus and one is in San Francisco," Brown's press secretary, Kandace Bender, said Tuesday morning. "San Francisco is definitely in the hunt to locate UCSF here."

Brown and others are trying to convince university officials to locate a campus on a 50-acre parcel near the proposed Giants ballpark on the waterfront and next to the first phase of the Mission Bay project.

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Catellus Development Corp. President Nelson Rising confirmed talks about the new campus, saying, "From my first day here two years ago, we have had an ongoing dialogue about what, if anything, we could do at Mission Bay to help keep them (UCSF) in San Francisco. Those discussions continue on a variety of fronts."

He declined to elaborate.

Brown and Catellus are expected in the next several days to unveil plans for the first phase of the development that would turn 65 acres of industrial land along King Street north of Mission Creek into apartments, town homes, retail space and public parks.

"We expect a joint announcement soon," Rising said.

"There are still a couple issues to hammer out (but) we're close."

The plan - which includes some 3,000 housing units, 20 percent of them for low and moderate-income residents - would complete the north section of the on-again, off-again Mission Bay development.

University officials, strapped with an outgrown Parnassus Heights campus, reportedly have narrowed new campus sites to Alameda, Brisbane and The City. Rudy Nothenberg, Brown's chief negotiator on the Mission Bay project, Gap chairman Donald Fisher and other prominent businessmen reportedly are lobbying university officials to select the waterfront site.

The UC board of regents will not select a site until at least next spring, according to university officials.

Along with the ballpark and new housing, a UCSF campus would help resurrect an area now given over largely to empty lots and vacant warehouses.

Originally planned as "a city within a city," Mission Bay was to have included office space as well as housing and other facilities.

Citing a downturn in the real estate market, Catellus in February backed out of its 1991 agreement to transform 313 acres along the waterfront into millions of square feet of office space.

The rapidly recovering housing market, however, has resurrected the smaller, 65-acre project that would include market-rate housing, parks and a retail-entertainment center.

The plan also now involves The City's Redevelopment Agency, which reduces the bureaucratic hurdles for the project, gives The City some oversight in the project and could provide bond&lt;